No Priors Ep. 111 | With KoBold Metals Co-Founder and President Josh Goldman

(instrumental music plays) Hi, listeners, and welcome back to No Priors. Today, we're speaking with Josh Goldman, co-founder of Cobalt Metals. Cobalt is building the world's largest collection of geoscience data, and using their AI tools to better identify mineral deposits like lithium and copper to be a better explorer. Cobalt invests over $100 million annually across 70 projects on four continents today. Josh, welcome to No Priors.

It's a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

This is a super interesting real-world business. You run a intelligent mining company. What does that mean? What does Cobalt do?

We explore for minerals. We're looking for lithium and copper and the other metals that we need to build other businesses that are powered by batteries and AI, uh, and we develop AI technologies and we combine AI with human intelligence to be better explorers and more successful at finding the sources of minerals that we need for these businesses.

Are you both finding them as well as actually gonna do the mining? Or is it only a, a tool to find these sorts of assets or resources?

That's a central question. So we, the... Our business is focused on exploration, and it's focused on exploration for a couple of reasons. One is because there's way more value to be created there. And the second is that's where technology can be really differentiating. The economics of exploration are really quite extraordinary. Uh, with a few million dollars of capital, you can create 100 to 1,000 times return. Exploration is a very old business. Think about, you know, gold miners back in, in, you know, in the middle of the 19th century. Uh, if you can get the right claims, you can strike it rich if you can dig in the right places. It's about where you look and how effectively you can look. Uh, and so the unit economics of discovery are really extraordinary. The problem with exploration as a business is that the success rate's really low. You have to try many, many different places before you can find something, and the problem keeps getting harder. Uh, but that's also the reason why technology is so differentiating. We're looking for things that are harder and harder to find. It used to be that you could find minerals literally with your eyeballs by walking across the ground and prospecting. And a lot of the copper ore minerals that form at the surface, uh, that are, are modified by the air and the water and the surface environment turn blue and green like the patina on the Statue of Liberty. Though anything you can find by traipsing across the ground with your eyes has been found by now, and we need more intelligent ways of looking for minerals in places that are concealed, that are literally underground and concealed by the rocks. And so technology, uh, is a way to create differentiation to be a much better explorer. Now, once we find things that there's, there's a continuum from you had a good idea and you collected some rock samples, you found something underground, you have many different holes and you've established that you've got something continuous, to, "Oh, it's gonna be economic to mine this," to, "We're designing the mine," to, "We're building the mine." There's a whole spectrum in the technology that we use to find resources and to find those resources helps set a project up to be a more economical mine as well. So we continue to contribute technology and, and stay involved in projects as they evolve.